Nantucket VR rooms and island-wide tourist AR
Two products, one identity package. VR is a room. AR is a walk. Do not stream a live MetaHuman across 48 square miles in July sun.
Existing commercial GPS audio tours already cover Atheneum → Meeting House → Vestal. Earn the install by being sourced, labeled, and tied to the season-one figure — not by adding another narration layer.
1. VR (stay inside)
Quest-class, seated + teleport, 1:1 scale. Build three rooms over two years. Each room is a dated scene, not an open island.
| Room | Year of scene | Who speaks | Where it lives physically |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vestal roof walk | 1 Oct 1847 | Mitchell | MMA / off-site Quest loan at Hinchman or Atheneum |
| Whaleship cabin | 1848–53 or 1853–56 | Veeder or Brock | Whaling Museum education space |
| Meeting House interior | 1845 petition week | Retrieval Boston + Ross text as document, not generated Ross | MAAH only |
Optional later: Atheneum stacks (librarian day); Essex whaleboat is a trauma-gated after-hours room, not a tourist default.
Performance: UE Optimized MetaHuman, baked monologue + live Q&A only on a known Wi-Fi SSID. Offline = monologue + look-around.
Do not VR the whole harbor. Tucker’s Roofwalk already has the view; VR cannot beat it.
2. Island AR — what tourists actually carry
Tier A (ship year one): billboard / USDZ carded figure or object + 60–90 seconds of authored audio + captions. GPS + image target. Works on mid-range phones in glare.
Tier B (staff iPad / member loan only): anchored fuller body. Do not promise this to every ferry passenger.
One app or WebAR wrapper. Five loops, not fifty pins. Each pin: date, source line, “this is an interpretation,” deep-link into the booked kiosk if they want Q&A.
Loop A — Downtown core (walk, 45–70 min)
Matches the existing Core District / NHA map.
| Stop | Pin | Content (season 1) |
|---|---|---|
| Whaling Museum, 13 Broad | Orient | Map of loops. No Essex gore here. |
| Straight Wharf | Harbor departures | Clerk: what a 1840s departure looked like. Not a captain AI. |
| Compass Rose mural | Wayfinding | Visual only + one sourced line on Valparaíso / Essex rescue geography — beat 3 voice. |
| Atheneum, 1 India | Mitchell librarian | 90-sec day-job. Great Hall plaque for 11 Aug 1841 Douglass as scene, not Douglass-mind. |
| Pacific National Bank, Main | William Mitchell’s station | Father/daughter observing. Thin. |
| Centre / “Petticoat Row” | Dated post-1860 | Correction card + directory names. No 1740 shopkeeper ghost. |
| Fair Street Meeting / NHA library | Mott / Quaker | Hicksite visit pin if Mott chapter is live; else architecture only. |
Loop B — Vestal cluster (walk or Wave + walk, 30–45 min)
The Mitchell product.
| Stop | Pin |
|---|---|
| 1 Vestal, Mitchell House | Billboard of 1840s Maria; house hours |
| Yard / roof mark | Comet-night AR postcard — the only full-body AR in year one |
| Vestal Observatory / Study | Object: Clark. Label: successor building, 1908 |
| Old Gaol, 15R Vestal | Optional civic pin, no character |
| Loines, 59 Milk Ext | Night “look up” — modern MMA clerk, not Maria |
| Prospect Hill | Quiet burial card. No voice from the ground |
Loop C — New Guinea (walk, 25–40 min)
Only with MAAH.
| Stop | Pin |
|---|---|
| Seneca Boston house, York St | Family/place card. No invented Absalom face |
| African Meeting House, 29 York | Petition document AR (Ross text on the page) |
| Five Corners / mill area | Geography of New Guinea, not a tour-bus script |
Loop D — Water and mills (bike / Wave, 60–90 min)
| Stop | Pin |
|---|---|
| Brant Point Light | Harbor entrance; no character required |
| Old Mill, 50 Prospect | 1746 machine as object lesson |
| Oldest House, 16 Sunset Hill | 1686 fabric; Starbuck-era card if that brief is live |
| Hadwen House | Wealth after oil; not a talking Hadwen |
Loop E — Far island (bike paths, ~35 miles of sidepath)
Sconset, Sankaty Head, Madaket, Great Point, Sanford Farm, Shipwreck & Lifesaving Museum, Bartlett’s Farm.
No live historical mind out here in year one. Landscape + one lifesaving or wreck card at the Shipwreck Museum if they want it. Battery, glare, and private-property pins will kill a hero mesh on the moors.
3. How the tourist day should feel
- Ferry / Visitor Services, 25 Federal — download / WebAR, loop map, cutoff sentence.
- Downtown Loop A on foot.
- Optional booked kiosk (Atheneum or Vestal) for real Q&A.
- Evening Loines or Study if MMA is open.
- Next day: Loop B or C, not both stuffed into one afternoon.
Push-to-talk only at kiosks. Street AR is listen-and-look. Cobblestones + summer crowds + a talking full-body in the middle of Main is a blockage and a parody.
4. Technical constraints on this island
- Cellular mid-island and in some lanes is uneven; cache Loop A–C on first launch.
- Fog and noon glare: high-contrast captions, no thin gold type.
- Historic-district taste: no floating chrome UI on Main.
- NRTA Wave + sidepaths for Loops D–E; GPS drift near the harbor.
- Image targets on plaques beat raw GPS at Atheneum / Meeting House / Vestal.
- Schools will need an allowlisted endpoint if any Q&A leaves the device.
- Partner or ignore Drives-and-Detours-style GPS audio; do not clone it.
5. What not to pin
- Maushop / “last Wampanoag” first person
- Talking Douglass
- Essex cannibalism on a restaurant wall
- Macy’s-founder mascot
- A pin on every Grey Lady plaque until the corpus exists
- Live generative chat from the beach
6. Build order
| Phase | Ship |
|---|---|
| Season 1 | VR roof + 3 AR anchors (Vestal yard, Atheneum, Pacific Bank) + downtown orient pin |
| Season 1b | Gardner dual at Atheneum kiosk; Loop A Petticoat correction card |
| Season 2 | Cabin VR at the museum; Loop C only after MAAH MOU |
| Later | Far-island object cards; Essex after-hours VR |
Year-one AR is a postcard of Mitchell, not a second product line. The island-wide dream is a map of honest pins that deep-link into rooms you already paid to make.